


The Rush Cycle

by Rotifer



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen, Metafiction, recursive fiction
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-11
Updated: 2020-04-11
Packaged: 2021-03-01 20:15:45
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,995
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23552908
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rotifer/pseuds/Rotifer
Summary: Fictional discourse posts on a fictional epic fantasy series.
Kudos: 6





	1. The Rush Cycle Back Cover Blurbs

Book 1: The Shatterdark Sword

> Rosemary Rush is trapped inside her dreams.
> 
> It started with a recurring nightmare about being locked in a cold iron room for hours, with no windows and no light except that which shone from a glowing golden sword in a pedestal. Then, one night, she was let out – but not into the waking world. Instead she discovers a magical country called Threm, full of kings and courtiers and noble houses, swordsmen and sorcerers and strange creatures.
> 
> The sword, she learns, is called the Shatterdark Sword. And if she ever wants to wake up, she’ll need to find out why it called her here, and why its many magical abilities are now only answering to her hand. But first she’ll need to learn to survive, not just the monsters of Threm, but the many unscrupulous nobles and citizens who want the power of the Sword for themselves, and are willing to go through her to get it.

Book 2: Into the Widowmarch

> Rosemary Rush has finally woken from her endless dream of the magical country of Threm, but every night in her sleep she returns, sometimes for what feels like days or weeks at a time – and the wizard Oneiroclast suspects that if she dies in her dream, she might not just wake up in the real world.
> 
> Oneiroclast thinks the Dreamwood might be the only place Rosemary is safe from Threm’s conniving nobles – and he’s one of the only people in Threm that Rosemary can trust. But the only way to the Dreamwood is across Threm’s northeastern border, a place called the Widowmarch, a place of which she’s only heard rumors and ghost stories.
> 
> It’s a desolate wasteland filled with evil spirits, created during Threm’s all-too-recent war with the Dreamwood’s strange and reclusive elves. If Rosemary can survive the treacherous and exhausting journey, there’s a chance the elves will agree to harbor her. But the spirits of the Widowmarch would like nothing more than to destroy Rosemary’s magic sword, and slaughter anyone who gets in their way.

Book 3: Manners of Elves

> Rosemary Rush dreams of a magical world every night, and her dreams may be more real than than the real world. In hiding from the scheming and duplicitous nobles and courtiers of the country of Threm, Rosemary is trying to ingratiate herself with the elves of the Dreamwood.
> 
> Far from willowy humans with pointed ears, the elves of the Dreamwood are spirits that dream each other into existence, populating the Dreamwood with fey creatures out of their own imaginings. It can be hard to tell where Rosemary’s own dreams of Threm and the Dreamwood end and the elves’ dreams begin, or whether there’s even a difference.
> 
> But when the Marquis of Bones, Rosemary’s old foe from the Widowmarch, appears in the Dreamwood pleading his redemption, the elves turn to Rosemary and her friends to judge his sincerity. Rosemary will have to find out whether the Marquis is genuine in his remorse, or whether he’s up to something – and if he is, find out how to stop him before it’s too late.

Book 4: Oneiroclasm

> Rosemary Rush, safe from the nobles of Threm among the elves of the Dreamwood, is learning magic from the wizard Oneiroclast. Of course, Threm, the Dreamwood, and Oneiroclast only exist inside her dreams – but Rosemary’s dreams seem to be just as real as real life.
> 
> In fact, with each passing day, her dreams of Oneiroclast and her other friends in the Dreamwood seem more and more like wakefulness, and waking life feels more and more like a dream. Soon, she fears, she might go to sleep in the Dreamwood and dream ordinary dreams, and never see the real world again.
> 
> Her studies with Oneiroclast may be the only way to find out what’s happening to her. But Pollux, her best friend since her days in Threm, thinks Oneiroclast himself might be responsible for it. She’s weathered threats of all kinds with her friends at her side, but now Rosemary needs to decide which of her friends she can trust.

Book 5: The Thousand Doors

> For years, Rosemary Rush has dreamed of a magical land populated by humans and elves on the brink of war. These dreams have always seemed just as real as waking life, if not more so. But now the walls between her dreams and reality are collapsing – portals to Threm and the Dreamwood are opening all over the real world, more and more often. If something isn’t done, one or both worlds might be destroyed.
> 
> To make matters worse, Threm is on the brink of a civil war. The reigning queen has died, and her twin heirs are nowhere to be found. If one of them doesn’t turn up soon, the noble houses could start an all out war – and there are rumors that some of them have already secured alliances with countries in the real world.
> 
> The wizard Oneiroclast has fled, and the only other person who understands dream magic as well as him is Iliaquish the elf. Iliaquish thinks that the two worlds can be stabilized, but only if he and Rosemary travel to the center of her dream world.
> 
> It’s time for Rosemary to return to Threm.

Book 6: Justice or Mercy

> Rosemary Rush controls all the portals between the world of her dreams and the real world. Her best friend Pollux has just been crowned king of the dream-country of Threm. Neither one of them has the first clue what they’re doing.
> 
> With Iliaquish and Oneiroclast both gone, Rosemary and Pollux will have to find new mentors. But to find people worthy to help them lead Threm, they’ll need to learn to see their homelands in a new light – Rosemary Rush with the waking world North American Federation, and Pollux with Threm itself.
> 
> The power of the Shatterdark Sword won’t be able to help Rosemary now – there’s more to ruling a country than stamping out evil. She and Pollux will have to learn to understand the people in their care, and to sift through Threm’s nobles to find the people they can trust, in order to give the people of Threm everything they need and deserve.

Book 7: The Eaters of Dreams

> Every dream has the potential to grow into a new universe.
> 
> There is something that, until now, has prevented them from doing so.
> 
> Rosemary Rush is about to make contact with it.

Book 8: Ever More Facets

[ _unpublished, in progress_ ]


	2. not-itself-good on the Marquis of Bones

_not-itself-good wrote:_

> so the latest round of rush cycle hellsite discourse is whether rosemary was right to kill the marquise of bones in book three. now obviously enough ink has been spilled over mob to drown the entire world, and by rights we should all be sick to death of talking about him. but everyone wants to know where everyone else stands on this issue, so here’s my two cents.
> 
> now what i want to say up front is - i like the marquise of bones as a character and frankly i sympathize with him as a person. i wouldn’t want to spend time with him, or with any other wardemon, but like… characters who have done bad things, and who are bad people, but who are trying to be good people even though they suck at it, and who are hated and feared for a complex mix of just and unjust reasons, just speak to me. and i don’t think that’s an unreasonable sort of character to be spoken to by.
> 
> i also agree with a lot of other fans that the marquis of bones and the wardemons in general were really underutilized! one of the central themes of the rush cycle is what it means to be evil, and the wardemons as a kind of riff on or deconstruction of the fantasy trope of an always-chaotic-evil species were a great angle to explore that theme from imo… but they don’t play a very significant role in the story after the end of elves. they get explored for two books and then kind of left on the back burner, which is a shame.  
>  all of which is to say - this isn’t me coming after villain fans or whatever. i’m not here to accuse anyone of “woobifying” mob. i don’t think you’re a bad person or whatever if you think that, had mob been left alive, he could’ve become a good person and a valuable member of rosemary’s party.
> 
> with that said…
> 
> from a watsonian perspective, i think rosemary behaved reasonably.
> 
> mob’s plan was a bad idea! i don’t think any non-elf in the rush cycle understands elves well enough to be able to responsibly create one, and mob created dozens or maybe hundreds. mob claims the elves in his care didn’t suffer, and maybe that’s true, but… okay **this is gonna be an incredibly upsetting analogy, skip ahead to next bolded text if you don’t want to hear it** but here we go: 
> 
> if you created an infant human, and prevented that infant from ever growing up, and periodically injected that infant with heroin, then even if you never ran out of heroin and managed to keep it on a heroin-high for its entire life without overdosing it or letting it go into withdrawal, i think you’d still be doing something wrong even if it’s difficult to characterize exactly what in naive utilitarian terms. and that’s assuming you know with 100% confidence that the baby is actually meaningfully happy which, again, i don’t think mob did.
> 
> **incredibly upsetting analogy over** thank you for putting up with me. point being that mob created a kind of elf that other elves found morally horrifying to create, and i don’t think it was rosemary’s place as a non-elf to second-guess that. mobs elves weren’t going to develop like free elves do, their dreams weren’t going to be like free elves’ dreams were. i think when iliaquish says “…but their contentment would be hollow, bone-colored, and their dreams wastelands barren of import,” we’re meant to take from that that mob was failing his elves, that he was wrong about what they needed and deserved, even if they didn’t seem to be hurting.
> 
> (i think… it’s easy not to sympathize with elves because they’re so alien, at times the narrative presents them more like complicated magic objects or processes than like alien people - but they are people, i think, and they’re people who understand themselves and each other better than humans do.)
> 
> i also think it’s really silly to suggest that mob’s plan would’ve worked if rosemary and the elves didn’t discover it and stop it. mob says his elves were a way for the human nations to get what they wanted from elf dreams without harming the dreamwood, but like… okay at the risk of just retyping everything i just typed about how the dreamwood elves viewed mob’s elves… they would not have found that a satisfactory solution, they were adamant that mob’s elves were being harmed, and that they considered that harm just as wrong as harm to any of their number.
> 
> obviously the dreamwood elves weren’t ever supposed to know about mob’s elves, but like… even if, for the sake of argument, we assume that mining mob’s elves’ dreams was morally acceptable, i just don’t think keeping that secret would’ve been sustainable. even before the war, there was lots of interaction between the elves and the humans, and if that level of interaction kept up during the second peace, the elves would have noticed that the humans were getting mithril and gild-leaf lumber from somewhere, and they would’ve tried to figure out where. and whether they found mob’s elves or whether the humans successfully rebuffed their investigations, that almost certainly would’ve sparked a second war.
> 
> basically mob’s plan was an ethical and instrumental catastrophe, from every angle, and he wasn’t willing to turn aside from it, and i think rosemary made the right call in stopping it.


End file.
